Anti-Muslim tweets spike after Nice attack: study

Islamophobic tweets spiked the day after the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice, France, hitting almost 22,000, according to data collected by the U.K.-based think thank Demos.

Since March, Demos found an average of almost 5,000 Islamophobic tweets a day. The majority of the messages came from European countries, notably the U.K., the Netherlands, France and Germany.

Demos said it was a worrying trend that people are lashing out at the wider Muslim world, rather than terrorist group such as ISIL and its deadly acts. Demos analyzed tweets sent in English between March and July and searched for specific words and hashtags related to Islamophobia.

“No one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others,” said Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s senior director of public policy for EMEA.

Twitter launched a new multiple tweet reporting system in April, which allows users to attach many tweets to a single report to better show examples of abuse.

However, hateful hashtags can be more than they seem. The xenophobic hashtag #StopIslam, for example, initially started trending in the wake of the Brussels attacks, but then people started using it to criticize its xenophobic origins.

Joanna Plucinska contributed.

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Tom Cullem

Study finds 85 people including 10 children slaughtered by Islamic extremist are never going to come back to life, and if you figure a minimum of four relatives for each victim, that is about 400 additional heartbroken, devastated creatures on the planet due to Islamofascism. Study also finds that Islamophobia, not Islamofascism, is the cause of anger at Muslims expressed through social media. Islamofascism, study concludes, is blameless. The fault lies entirely with ethnic European populations.